Satoru Iwata: Download Paris Speech Video

We're offering a video of the Nintendo president's entire speech at the European DS Launch event, in which global and Euro-specific Nintendo issues are discussed.

Although he usually opts to use the formidable translation services of Nintendo's global PR boss Yasuhiro Minagawa, the charismatic Nintendo president is never one to shy away from a good bout of English. Satoru Iwata's speech at the European DS launch event in Paris last week proved just that, offering his lengthiest English-language speech to date.

Satoru Iwata's presentation "touched" on important DS issues

Coming in at around twelve minutes, the confident presentation from Ninty's global president ever since summer 2002 dwarfed his snappy E3 presentations, and successfully discussed a number of key Nintendo issues from both worldwide and Europe-specific perspectives - all with barely a single language hiccup.

After being welcomed onto the video wall by Nintendo's European boss Satoru Shibata, many assumed he simply had not made his rumoured flight to the event - much to the panic of some NDA'd journalists who'd already written about the key surprises before the event, including Iwata's appearance. Semi-amusingly, Iwata then made it into the stage after NOE's Jim Merrick said that "he should be here in person for the occasion".

Iwata went on to talk about the increasing importance of Europe in the global games marketplace, something he discussed at length in our last interview with him (see here for that) - something which he gave a pertinent DS-flavoured update to on the Paris stage.

We decided to make our "no tripod but it'll definitely do" video of the speech available for download, since he does "touch" on a number of interesting and important Nintendo related issues, which will be of interest to both European and international fans.

In addition to our initial report from the event, which offered key launch details, along with the videos we've just added of Mario Kart DS (which debuted exclusively later in the conference) and other titles, we're going to wrap up our coverage of the Paris event with a special treat -- showing you some tantalising and exclusive shots of a well-known girl band strutting their stuff at the after-show party (now live - see links below!)

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